If you are avid family travelers, then you likely follow several social media accounts or Youtube channels featuring families that sell everything they own, quit their jobs, and hit the road. These people are inspirational because if you love travel, nothing seems more aspirational than doing it full-time. However, the reality is that most of us will never commit to a nomadic lifestyle. There are too many reasons keeping us home most weeks of the year: family commitments, career progression, financial security, and wanting our kids to grow up with a sense of community and connection being but a few. For us, the challenge is trying to maximize our travel opportunities on a part-time basis while maintaining a home base. If we are working parents and our kids are enrolled in traditional school, the biggest hurdle is often time. Finding enough time off from our work and school commitments to accomplish our travel goals can be tough. Over the years, we have learned a number of tricks to help maximize family travel time. Here are our top tips to help you do the same.
Start when your kids are young
If your job provides enough flexibility, but the school calendar does not, consider pulling your kids out of school to maximize family travel time. Some people would argue that academics should trump recreation. But we would argue that travel can be the very best teacher there is.
Pulling kids from school is easier the younger they are. In our experience, missing days in elementary school was never terribly consequential. Missing days in high school became increasingly more difficult. So if you have some longer trip goals in mind that won’t fit neatly around the school calendar, consider taking them when your kids are younger rather than older.
You might also choose to take advantage of the ebb and flow of the school calendar when selecting your vacation time. Take advantage of PA days, when students are not in school, or times of year when there are activities happening at school that result in less instruction time: the week leading up to Christmas holidays (that might involve time dedicated to holiday parties, talent shows, and assemblies), winter carnivals, track and field and/or play days.
Regardless of how old your kids are, talk to the school before your trip and let them know about the upcoming absence.
Or… wait until they are older
At the opposite end of the spectrum, you might strategically decide to delay certain trips until your kids are older. Once they graduate from secondary school and move on to college, university or trades education, their schedule will shift again. Where we are, the elementary and secondary school calendars run from September until June each year, but college and university only run from September until April. There’s a longer break over the Christmas holidays (3 weeks versus 2), and 2 Reading Weeks each year (whereas elementary and secondary students only get a single week for March Break). This additional flexibility makes it easier to schedule longer trips when the kids are older.
Select vacation days strategically
Scheduling your paid time off adjacent to statutory holidays is the easiest way to maximize your time off. If you book a week of vacation that coincides with a statutory holiday, you will have 9 days in a row of vacation time (including the bookending weekends – ALWAYS bookend with weekends!) while only burning through 4 vacation days. If you book your travel during periods with multiple consecutive statutory holidays – for example, late December, when you can take advantage of Christmas, Boxing Day (in some regions), and New Year’s Day – you can stretch your vacation time even further.
The downside to this approach is that these tend to be busy travel periods, because everyone else is trying to maximize family travel time, too. As such, airports are more crowded, hotels fill up quicker, and prices can be steeper. But if you choose to travel on a holiday itself, rather than in the days leading up to it, you might find the opposite is true. My sister once flew on Christmas Day in order to attend a Boxing Day get-together. She reported that the airports were ghost towns.
Maximize family travel time by prioritizing direct flights
When you are short on time and have a packed travel itinerary, nothing can throw a wrench in things worse than a missed connection. (Lost luggage might come a close second.) When booking flights for a short trip, it’s always worth it to book a direct flight. That way, even if the flight is delayed a few hours, you’ll still be able to get your trip back on track. If you miss a connecting flight altogether, you’ll be at the airline’s mercy to get you on the next available flight. And depending on which airline you are flying with, that “next available flight” might not happen the same day.
We learned this lesson the hard way with a trip to Belize. We took a week-long trip and connected through both Miami and Belize City en route to Hopkins, Belize. Our flight left Toronto on time, but there was a mechanical issue with our connecting flight in Miami that pushed our departure back by 5 hours. We were supposed to have taken a puddle jumper flight down the coast of Belize to Hopkins on the last leg of our journey. But those flights only operate during daylight hours, and due to our delay, we missed the last one. We wound up having to take a bumpy 3-hour-long van shuttle ride instead, arriving well past midnight, good and exhausted. It’s a mistake we won’t make again.
Spring for private tours
When you’re young and early in your career, earning a starting salary wage, it can be difficult to believe this. But the time comes for many of us when our time becomes worth more than our money. Once you have reached this point, it makes sense to book private tours and transfers whenever possible.
These will save you a significant amount of time, which is essential when every day counts and you are trying to maximize family travel time. You will be able to set your own agenda, rather than being beholden to public transit schedules. And you’ll also be able to focus on the attractions you want to see and activities you want to do, rather than wasting time on aspects of package tours that might not interest you. Plus, you’ll never have to wait at a rest stop while a tour bus full of 40+ tour group members queue up for restroom facilities that might only accommodate a handful of people at a time.
This can be an expensive way to see the world in some areas, but if you choose travel destinations in developing countries rather than developed countries, you might be pleasantly surprised by how far your dollars can go.
Limit time zone changes
If you are taking a short trip, another strategy to maximize family travel time is to limit the number of time zones you cross. Traveling from east to west or vice versa will mess with your body clock and leave you a bit out of sorts for the first few days while you battle jet lag. This can be particularly troublesome when traveling with small children. If they are up through the night, you can bet that you will be up with them, too.
When our kids were young, we limited time zone changes as much as possible, and tried to focus on travel opportunities that took us north or south rather than east or west. As they grew older and were able to understand the concepts of time change and jet lag, we ventured further afield. We explained to them the detrimental effect that time zone changes would have on our trip if we didn’t ensure that we were well-rested, and got them on board with us in trying to minimize it.
Choose overnight travel options
This is one of my favourite tips, not just in terms of its usefulness in maximizing family travel time, but also because of the sense of adventure that it perpetuates. If you can sleep while you’re changing locations from A to B, you’ll be making the most efficient use of your time. And there are all kinds of options that allow you to do this beyond the ubiquitous red-eye flight. You can also take an overnight sleeper train (which we did in China) or book passage on an overnight ferry (as we’ll be doing this summer in Scandinavia).
Maximize family travel time by booking attractions in advance
When you’re on a short trip and want to maximize family travel time, do as much planning as possible before you leave home. This includes making reservations and purchasing tickets to attractions in advance. You’ll eliminate a lot of time wasted waiting in line not only for popular restaurants, but also for landmarks and attractions, many of which sell admission tickets online and allow you to skip the line if you hold them. As a bonus, you won’t have to navigate a language barrier at the ticket booth if you complete the purchase online (possibly with help from Google Translate).
Take a leave of absence
Let’s say you want to do a longer trip, one that involves travel to a far-flung locale that you won’t likely make it back to again in your lifetime. But you have limited paid time off, and employing all of the above tricks still won’t give you enough to accommodate the itinerary you have in mind. Many employers offer leave of absence benefits that you might look into exploring.
Leaves of absence have historically been used to accommodate parental and caregiver duties, bereavement, medical issues, education, and reserve duties. But in recent years, it has also become more socially acceptable to take a personal leave for extended travel. What makes a leave of absence different than a break from work or resignation is the fact that in a leave of absence protects an employee’s job. When an employee is on a leave of absence, the employer must allow the employee to return to the same job, or a similar one if the old job no longer exists.
Circumstances surrounding leaves of absence vary from employer to employer, but generally, they are unpaid. Seniority and credit for length of service continue to accrue during a leave of absence. Any bonus payouts to which the employee is entitled will generally be reduced by the leave of absence.
Maximize family travel time by considering your career
If you are early in your career and you know you want to live a life full of travel, opt for a career that will allow you that flexibility. There are a myriad of ways this could play out. Maybe you could work in education – teachers and school nurses enjoy time off while the school shuts down for summer holidays, Christmas, and spring break. There are other jobs that are seasonal in nature, too. For example, landscaping companies are busy from spring through fall, but many shut down during the winter.
Or work as a contractor in any field, interspersing periods of work with time off to travel before starting the next contract. Consider working a location-independent job, though be aware that there are complications with this option – tax laws, rules about work visas, and so on. No matter which you choose, the fact is that the notion of “work” is far more flexible today than it was 20 years ago, when 9-5 office jobs were the norm.
In conclusion…
For many people, lack of time is the most constraining factor in planning their travels, and when kids are involved and school calendars need to be considered, things get even more complicated. It’s worth giving some thought to how to maximize family travel time. Hopefully these tips have given you some ideas to do just that. Have any more tips that we haven’t listed here? Please let us know in the comments below.
